Ontario Votes 2007: How to Stop a Liberal back-to-back-to-back Victory

The knives are out and the writ hasn’t even been dropped. As John Tory heads to, in the words of a rare example of insight from the shameless self promoter not named “Warren”, “destroy his second PC Party”, the last two posts made on the Blogging Tories site as of 6:15 pm are from Sandy, who wonders how after 11 years of infighting on the federal level, conservatives are about to do it all over again provincially, and ALW, who gives the knife a twist by calling out Tory as the only thing he could be considered to a conservative planning to vote PC this October: the “not McGuinty”.

In fairness to Sandy, I have to point out one difference and one similarity: First, there is no natural alternative to the PC Party right now in Ontario for principled conservative voters to turn to. We’re not going to see the Liberals sweep 99% of the seat in Ontario and the PC Party will be back to fight in 208, or 2012 or whenever the following election will come up. Note one major similarity though as well: in 2007, the Ontario PC Party is running a disastrous campaign under John Tory. In 1993, the federal PC Party ran a disastrous campaign under Kim Campbell, no, John Tory! That’s right, Tory was the campaign manager for Campbell’s campaign in 1993. He approved this mozzaball (remember this when he tells you how nice of a guy/campaigner he is!). In short, Tory literally can’t even promise the polite, cleanish Liberal-clone government that red tories are so proud to promote.

So where does this leave PCs, socons, libertarians, objectionalists and other blue conservatives? Well, they could hold their noses and vote PC again just to get McGuinty out of office. After all, that’s what many of us did in 2003 as Ernie Eves trashed Mike Harris’ legacy for just over a year. Of course, even Eves realized that he needed to shore up his base and so the platform he released had at least some moderately conservative measures. The only one out there so far is the private school funding mess Tory is promising and is greatly mishandled, as well as being far more statist than conservative!

There is another line of thinking though. What if traditional PC voters allowed McGuinty to win again. Now, before you all string me up for the gallows hear me out! Where will we be in four years under another Liberal government? Eight years into a pit of big government spending and mismanaged policies…much like 1995. Where would we be if Tory wins in four years? Eight years into a pit of big government spending and mismanaged policies. The only difference is that at least if Tory has to resign as leader after an election defeat, the PC Party can correct its brutal error of 2004 and elect a decent leader who’ll put this province back on track. If Tory does win, the next election will just put us back to the here and now: two Liberal leaders — one with a red tie, one with a blue. We’d have three consecutive Liberal governments instead of two!